Can anyone tell me for certain if there is any significant advantage to color and tonal correcting high-end 16 bit RGB drum scans in Lightroom or Camera Raw vs using curves and levels adjustment layers in Photoshop? I know it isn't going to give you the kind of control you have working from a Raw file, but I'm wondering if it is worth doing at all on a film scan.

I think there are many opportunities for color and tone-correcting high-quality scans in ACR/LR. One reason would be to use the tone mapping technology (Highlights, Shadows, +Clarity) in ACR/LR which is not (yet) in Photoshop.

The advantages in my mind would not be about final image quality per se (both are using high bit) but more about workflow, ease of use and flexibility. I'd far prefer to make instruction based (parametric) instructions for an edit in LR/ACR. The alternative is Photoshop and layers which means the need for more processing horse power (Photoshop does have to open the entire document into memory just to view the darn thing, let alone apply those edits).

Andrew, I have long held a perception that the luminosity editing Eric refers to in his post above does MORE EASILY create a more satisfactory final result in LR than in PS, especially where it comes to opening shadow detail and improving contrast and "clarity" in darker areas of the image. It is true that we can achieve the same appearances working in Photoshop, but the workflow CAN BE more complicated, sometimes requiring the use of Blend Modes for example, whereas LR just requires managing a few sliders. Then of course there is the whole question of highlight recovery. I'm not sure whether LR's superior handling of highlight recovery works as effectively for rendered images as it does for raw files, but this *may be* another area where LR has a technical edge on PS.

Thanks everyone. This is close to what I was thinking. I'm not sure anyone has done direct comparison tests between Lightroom/ACR outcome and 16 bit drum scan worked on in Photoshop, but as Andrew mentioned, the work flow alone might be worth the worth the step, even if you have a 8 core Mac and yes, when your working with 500 - 1 gig files it certainly is faster! I guess it also depends on what you need to do to the file other than color correcting and basic levels adjustments. Clarity slider is also something to consider although I've never used it on anything but a Raw file.

I have always processed all my Mamiya 7 + Coolscan 9000ED scans in ACR/LR, Clarity did very nice job with the CCD flare of that scanner (that I hate so much). I even regretted that there's no DNG Profile suport for color neg and dia scans...

Marcin, I'm not sure what a DNG profile would buy us - for scanning, this is a jacket over a standard TIFF or PSD file. As far as I know, the fundamentals of the scanned output are no different with or without the DNG shell.

Marcin, I'm not sure what a DNG profile would buy us - for scanning, this is a jacket over a standard TIFF or PSD file. As far as I know, the fundamentals of the scanned output are no different with or without the DNG shell.

I'd simply like to take a photo of a CC24/CCSG on a color negative and create something like DNG profile for a given roll of film. You can profile scanner using IT8/HCT dia targets, but there's virtually no solution to profile negatives. I'm also not sure it would work even if implemented, but it's just a wish/idea.

Profiling of colour negative materials is bedeviled by the huge variety of masks that need to be neutralized, then the reversal process. Others have tried. As a result we rely on tools such as Negafix in SilverFast, and Vuescan also has such "profiles". If you can find a better way of doing it, such that we could have systematically reliable profiles upstream of the image processing algorithms that these other approaches deploy, it would be of considerable interest.

.................I think when dealing with a color neg, you have to fiddle to make it appear as you desire.

Indeed, but the extent of that fiddling can be managed in quite a slick manner with SilverFast's Negafix utility in the Expert Mode provided with the Ai Studio version of the software. Apart from the 130+ individual colour negative film types for which it offers Negafix profiles (to avoid confusion - these are NOT icc profiles), it also has a tool for tweaking both the luminosity and colour balance of any chosen profile and saving it as a new custom profile. This "revised profile" would be generally reliable for the same film processed at the same time under the same conditions as the one used for creating it. I provide extensive instruction on this procedure in my eBook. It's pretty good, bearing in mind that repeatability is only as reliable as the stability of the base conditions characterizing the original media in respect of both manufacture and processing.

I don't have any trouble anymore scanning all kinds of color negs, with no manual color adjustments in the scanner software. I'm using the Aztek Premier 8000 with the DPL software that is excellent for color negs, even old Vericolor 4x5 stuff. It makes what they call a CM, custom media setting, for each piece of film you scan. There is no way to "profile" color negs because each batch differs, not to mention the age of the film and how it was processed. On my old Howtek drum scanner with Silverfast I refused to scan color negs at all, it was a nightmare to say the least.

But this scanner will not save files as a DNG file to import into Camera Raw as can be done with say a new Imacon.

Does anyone know how that could be accomplished? Lightroom is no problem, but someone wants to know how to import this 16 bit RGB Tiff into Camera Raw. I don't know.

On my old Howtek drum scanner with Silverfast I refused to scan color negs at all, it was a nightmare to say the least.

john

Well, all the below originated as colour negatives scanned in SilverFast 6 using Negafix and it wasn't a nightmare. Learning curve for sure, and I've written it all up previously on this website, now superseded by the improved SilverFast 8.

Next to the tone mapping: Deconvolution sharpening of ACR and other RAW developers should address both the camera and scanner optical flaws. I has been discussed here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=45038.220However I do not think a drum scanner has optical flaws worth mentioning and if they are not comparable to cameras or CCD scanners. Anyway it works better than the similar sharpening in PS.

Noise reduction in the RAW developers like ACR is directed to sensors, for film grain I still use Neat Image afterwards in Photoshop.

Scanning on my Nikon 8000 with Vuescan there is a DNG export choice that gives a positive DNG "RAW" from negatives, no other changes applied. ACR will load that. (Qimage Ultimate usually crashed so far) Makes the tools in ACR for scanned negatives workable. Wonder whether that is possible from the Aztek.

I don't drum scan any longer yet always have and will do all control settings in LR. I wouldn't want to open each and every image in PS just to give the look to the image I like, nor could I make multiple virtual copies and various looks given. The controls are excellent, every aspect can be done in LR and those settings of course applied over a range of pictures with similar character.Organisation, key wording and meta data all very quick and painless in LR, not so in PS.

I agree with Neil. I do 95% of my image processing in Lightroom; (that said, scanning with SilverFast, there are good reasons to use a number of SilverFast tools first before importing the photo to the LR catalog). Photoshop is reserved for things Lightroom simply doesn't have the tools to do, and that is becoming less and less. But reverting to John's original question, there is nothing special about using DNG format or ACR for processing a scan. Underneath the DNG shell the image files are ordinary, rendered, pixel-based 3 channel RGB files, which either LR or ACR can process equally well. As LR and ACR have the same "Develop engine", there is no reason to use ACR if happy with the LR workflow from those drum scans.